Eramosa River Trail 3 Bridges Panorama, Guelph ON Canada

This 4.6 km loop walk begins at the 1992 Covered Lattice Truss Bridge, located near the confluence of the Eramosa and Speed Rivers. T he 65 metre bridge was built in 1992 by 400 volunteers of the Timber Framers Guild using traditional construction methods. The walk continues upstream past the York Street Park along the Eramosa River Trail (Guelph’s Royal Recreation Trail network) to the 200 8 Victoria Road South bridge. Its general contractor, Steed and Evans Ltd., situated t he bridge’s south abutment on Silurian dolomitic bedrock, whereas its north abutment is situated on glacial till overlying an ancient Speed River buried valley. A fter crossing the Eramosa , the path continues downstream along the Guelph Hiking Trail Club’s Radial Line Trail (James Street section) to Marianne’s Park, named to honour Marianne Goulden, a staff member at Women in Crisis who died by her husband in 1992. Crossing the Speed on the 2001 Gordon Street Bridge returns to the starting point . This precast concrete bridge replaced a 1935 four-span steel beam bridge. Recipient of a 2001 Ontario Concrete Award, its arch design complements nearby Gow’s bridge. The James Street section trail passes the Eramosa’s south bank S ilurian s edimentary strata, which resulted from marine deposits in ancient saltwater coral reefs 415- 430 Ma. In geological terms, the Eramosa and Speed are a ‘misfit stream s ’; their valley s w ere formed by precursor s . Ancient buried valleys, about 30 metres de e p, were e roded by these precursors a s indicated by missing south bank outcrops, in which the ancestral Speed’ s buried valley intersects the present-day Eramosa at the Victoria Road bridge. T he ancestral Eramosa’s buried valley is located near the present river’s south bank where Guelph’s municipal wells are located on Watson Road northwest of Arkell . See “Pleistocene Geology of the Guelph Area” (1966: Ontario Department of Mines Geological Branch) for more information. Regrettably, both sides of the marshy Eramosa floodplain between Gordon Street and Victoria Rd were used for Guelph garbage and industrial dumpsites until the Eastview Road landfill opened in 1961. Additionally, about 10 such garbage dumps were located on the 2.5 km stretch of the Speed River’s marshy floodplain between Gordon Street and the Hanlon Park. Although the former dumps were covered with landfill and rehabilitated as parkland in the 1960s , river erosion periodically exposes buried garbage, and its leachates (e.g., from old car batteries, buried drums ) contaminate both streams which are major elements of the Grand River watershed, itself a significant element of the Lake Erie watershed . See “River Trash: Guelph’s Historical Garbage Just Below t he Surface” (Guelph Mercury Tribune , July 21, 2012) for more information about Guelph’s sad legacy of using both rivers as garbage dumps. See “ City Takes Action To Clean Up River Trash” (Guelph Mercury Tribune, July 28, 2012) for the city’s continuing remedia tion of this environmental legacy .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.